OUYA to ship to backers starting March 28, Portal's Kim Swift hops aboard with exclusive title

If you're proud to be an OUYA backer, you'll be even more proud in knowing that the company has at last confirmed a March 28th ship date just for those of you who helped crowdfund the Android console back when it was still a Kickstarter hopeful. OUYA today reaffirms that production remains on track for a full retail launch of their console later this June, when everyone else will be able to purchase it.

The Android console is certainly leaving the gates swinging; in addition to the ship date for backers, OUYA also confirmed that Portal and Left 4 Dead designer Kim Swift will be producing an exclusive title for the platform in cooperation with Airtight Games. Swift is due to announce this title "soon", but in the meantime offers quite the vindication for the OUYA:

"We truly feel that this platform will give us the freedom to fully realize the funky, unique game we have in mind. Though the title will definitely appeal to core gamers in terms of skill and difficulty, it really has a completely unexpected, imaginative slant that’s totally at home on this console."

Additional game announcements for the OUYA include The Ball from Tripwire Interactive also due for launch next month, Papo & Yo from Minority Media currently scheduled for this fall, and a new action RPG from nWay called ChronoBlade. On top of all that, OUYA has secured the services of Kellee Santiago as head of developer relations. Santiago previously served as Thatgamecompany's (Journey, Flower) chief executive.

harbin hardware and software has to be compiled a certain way that meets a specific set of requirements in order to be Google certified and bear the "default" Google apps, such as the Play store. Without that certification, they cannot include the Play store and hence cannot provide games purchased from Google Play. It's an unfortunate piece of the "fragmentation problem" of Android, but it makes sense somewhat.

As for the Ouya games being playable on other Android devices, probably depends on some kind of built-in DRM which I think would be easily cracked or at least the developers would want to target a larger market and release it on the Play store as well.

Tenklis the Ouya is pretty much just "mobile" games on your TV. Depending on how Steam/nVidia share their tech behind their Project Shield, it would be possible for it to play your Steam games streamed from the PC, but that could be locked down for awhile to either the Tegra Zone or the Play store, not clear yet.